Today I'm heading down to BIRC to spend half an hour hopefully getting my experiment to work on the new rig. Hopefully that'll be enough time, as I have a subject on saturday and won't have another chance to prep before then. It's always a bit risky cutting things this close, but I was slightly lazy in making arrangements to get things fixed, and so I get to deal with the consequences. BIRC is slightly inconvenient to get to (although if I still had a car, it would still be inconvenient, just in a different way)..
On the topic of car, my life does feel different, on reflection, now that I lack one. I feel significantly more carefree -- just like when I was in school and for a few years afterwards I always dreaded the possibility of getting a bad grade (I was a lazy student), when I had a car I feared seeing another ticket on the window or finding yet another thing had gone wrong and needed repair. That's gone now -- dreams of tickets and broken car are now so far from my experience that the idea seems laughable, and so my potential stress is much lower. I actively like not having a car -- in some sense it even feels like I've outwitted the universe, and that in some grand game of monopoly, I'm drawing "car troubles: $300" from Community Chest, and laughing because I'm immune. In other notes, this feels like it's going to be a good year (mentally, my years have their end/beginning in early fall because I live in academia). Some people I get along pretty well with moved nearby, I'm taking a fun class, and there are more people around. Two of my friends might also (hopefully) be getting jobs at CMU, which would be awesome. I also organised my pile of to-read, and find that I have a lot of wonderful books that are waiting for me. Life, by and large, is good. My hat already feels like a big part of who I am, like a sleeping limb awakening.
